Sinking of the sailing ship William P. Frye
- Category:
- Military operations
- Front:
- War at sea
- Date:
- 28 January 1915
- Author:
- Łukasz Skowroń
- Tags:
- United States, Germany, auxiliary cruisers, neutrality
On 28 January 1915, in the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil, the German auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich sank the American sailing ship William P. Frye. It was the first United States merchant ship sunk during the war, even though the United States remained a neutral country. The case became the subject of a long legal dispute between Washington and Berlin.
Wheat from Seattle
William P. Frye was a four-masted steel barque of about 3,400 gross register tons, built in 1901 by Arthur Sewall & Co. in Bath, Maine, which was also her owner. On 4 November 1914 she sailed from Seattle with a cargo of about 5,000 tons of wheat destined for Great Britain. The ship was to call at Queenstown, Falmouth or Plymouth. She was commanded by Captain Kiehne, whose wife accompanied him on the voyage.
Prinz Eitel Friedrich, an armed passenger liner, had sailed from Tsingtao in August and, after a spell in the Pacific, had moved to the Atlantic, where she hunted Entente merchant ships. Her commander, Max Thierichens, stopped the American barque on 27 January and sent a boarding party aboard.
Cargo overboard
The Germans treated the wheat as conditional contraband. Under the Declaration of London foodstuffs could be seized if they were destined for the armed forces or authorities of the enemy, and the cargo was bound for British ports, including fortified naval bases. Thierichens at first ordered the grain to be thrown overboard. The work went slowly, however, and the raider could not stay long in one place. The next day the Germans therefore took the crew, the captain and his wife, and the ship’s papers on board their own vessel, and William P. Frye was sunk with explosive charges.
The barque’s crew joined the several hundred prisoners from sunk ships whom Prinz Eitel Friedrich was carrying on board. For several weeks nothing was known in the United States about the fate of the sailing ship. Only on 10 March 1915 did the worn-out raider put in at Newport News, Virginia, where she released her prisoners, and she was soon interned.
The dispute over the treaty of 1799
The news of the sinking of an American ship caused a stir in the United States. At the end of March the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, demanded more than $228,000 in compensation from Germany for the owner and the captain. Berlin replied in April that the cruiser’s commander had acted in accordance with the laws of war, but admitted that under Article 13 of the Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1799, confirmed in 1828, contraband belonging to US citizens could not be confiscated without payment. The Germans therefore agreed to pay, but wanted the amount of compensation to be set by a German prize court. Washington replied that the treaty forbade the destruction of American ships altogether.
The dispute dragged on for months, in the shadow of the far more serious conflict over German submarine warfare. At the end of November 1915 Germany agreed that the amount of compensation should be set by experts of both sides, and proposed that the question of interpreting the treaty be referred for settlement to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
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